Some people say it's foolish to worry about soulless creatures overtaking the earth and devouring our brains.
I say they've already won.

Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Some Good Reads On The ACA Website

I like this take. First of all it notes - as should be noted - how hard it is to launch any new tech. We renovated two classrooms this summer, and we still can't get the ENO board projectors to work properly. I've already had to patch the new iPhone operating system I installed last month.

The piece does a good job explaining why healthcare.gov is such an IT nightmare.

But it goes further and describes what this could mean philosophically, both for Democrats and Republicans. The big glitch is the means-testing of applicants. If it was a universal, single payer system, none of these tech issues would be happening. Obamacare - as created by the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney - was always a patchwork of public and private insurance. And patchworks tend to fray at the seams.

Norm Ornstein of AEI has another interesting take about Obama's management style. It basically describes a dearth of technocrats in key places that know how to get things done. The piece also references an important point echoed by Howard Dean. The MIA states who failed to set up their own exchanges put a lot of stress on the national government to cover a lot more ground than it might otherwise have had to.

Dean mentions a great solution, namely that there should have been regional exchanges (as opposed to one national exchange) each with its own contractor. That way if one IT company screws up, the focus is on that IT company, providing the other exchanges work well.

Of course, there's always a nice simple single payer system...

UPDATE: I went to click through an article on ESPN and it sent me to the wrong article.